In our culture of high stakes testing, we have become fixated on test scores and district passing rates. Those schools with low passage rates are deemed ineffective in the court of public opinion, and the public seems not to care that certain schools have students who come to the table with more disadvantages than students at other schools—be those disadvantages economic, psychological, learning based, and so forth. But amidst this frenzy about testing, and this talk about standards, there is something no one’s telling you: by and large, teachers find the test to be an impediment to good learning, and state standards are not legally required—though most teachers think they are.
What we have, then, are teachers wasting time playing a matching game—finding the coded state standard to which a particular classroom activity aligns for the sake of documentation. That is time not spent trying to find creative new ways to teach kids. That is time spent sterilizing the learning process. The whole culture of the tests also encourages the teaching of OGT-specific test-taking skills—which is entirely different from teaching content or intellectual skills.
Professional teaching organizations have always been skeptical of these tests. According to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, “placing too much emphasis on a single test or on testing can undermine the quality of education and jeopardize equality of opportunity.”
NCTE joins with its sister organizations, the American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, and National Council on Measurement in Education in support of their Standard for Educational and Psychological Measurement 8.12 which states, “In elementary or secondary education, a decision or characterization that will have a major impact on a test taker should not automatically be made on the basis of a single test score” (1975, p. 54). Neither states, nor districts, nor schools, nor test publishers are currently abiding by this clear standard.
According to Karla Carruthers, press secretary for the Ohio Department of Education, “No school is legally required to align its curriculum to our standards ... Ohio is a local control state.”
One must wonder, then, whether the perceived emergency of students not passing the Ohio Graduation Tests relates to teachers not aligning their lessons to state standards, or whether they are spending too much time doing something that is not legally required!
Most people have never had the pleasure of seeing what it would be like to allegedly “align” a lesson with state standards. For those on the outside, it may sound like a perfectly reasonable strategy for being “accountable.” For the sake of argument, let’s just consider a 12th grade English class. In such a class, you may expect to read a piece of literature, and then write a paper about it. There are certain skills that go along with reading literature—like recognizing literary elements, considering theme, asking open-ended questions inspired by the text, and so forth. There are certain skills that go along with writing, too—like staying focused, organized, scholarly, etc. So let’s say a teacher, in preparing a student for college (or for a test) wants to give kids experience reading a text and writing a paper. Before doing that, many schools (under the false impression of a legal requirement) require teachers to “align themselves to standards.” That means the teacher will have to look through the enormous standards book, finding things like the following to enter into a “lesson plan form” for the purposes of documentation and political accountability:
Reading Process: Concepts of Print, Comprehension Strategies and Self-Monitoring Strategies
1. Apply reading comprehension strategies, including making predictions, comparing and contrasting, recalling and summarizing and making inferences and drawing conclusions.
2. Answer literal, inferential, evaluative and synthesizing questions to demonstrate comprehension of grade-appropriate print texts and electronic and visual media.
3. Monitor own comprehension by adjusting speed to fit the purpose, or by skimming, scanning, reading on, looking back, note taking or summarizing what has been read so far in text.
Reading Applications: Literary Text
1. Compare and contrast motivations and reactions of literary characters confronting similar conflicts (e.g., individual vs. nature, freedom vs. responsibility, individual vs. society), using specific examples of characters’ thoughts, words and actions.
2. Analyze the historical, social and cultural context of setting.
3. Explain how voice and narrator affect the characterization, plot
and credibility.
4. Evaluate an author’s use of point of view in a literary text.
5. Analyze variations of universal themes in literary texts.
8. Evaluate ways authors develop point of view and style to achieve specific rhetorical and aesthetic purposes (e.g., through use of figurative language irony, tone, diction, imagery, symbolism and sounds of language), citing specific examples from text to support analysis.
Writing Processes
1. Generate writing ideas through discussions with others and from printed material, and keep a list of writing ideas.
2. Determine the usefulness of and apply appropriate pre-writing tasks (e.g., background reading, interviews or surveys).
3. Establish and develop a clear thesis statement for informational writing or a clear plan or outline for narrative writing.
4. Determine a purpose and audience and plan strategies (e.g., adapting formality of style, including explanations or definitions as appropriate to audience needs) to address purpose and audience.
5. Use organizational strategies (e.g., notes and outlines) to plan writing.
6. Organize writing to create a coherent whole with an effective and engaging introduction, body and conclusion and a closing sentence that summarizes, extends or elaborates on points or ideas in the writing.
7. Use a variety of sentence structures and lengths (e.g., simple, compound and complex sentences; parallel or repetitive sentence structure).
8. Use paragraph form in writing, including topic sentences that arrange paragraphs in a logical sequence, using effective transitions and closing sentences and maintaining coherence across the whole through the use of parallel structures.
9. Use precise language, action verbs, sensory details, colorful modifiers and style as appropriate to audience and purpose, and use techniques to convey a personal style and voice.
10. Use available technology to compose text.
11. Reread and analyze clarity of writing, consistency of point of view and effectiveness of organizational structure.
12. Add and delete examples and details to better elaborate on a stated central idea, to develop more precise analysis or persuasive argument or to enhance plot, setting and character in narrative texts.
13. Rearrange words, sentences and paragraphs and add transitional words and phrases to clarify meaning and achieve specific aesthetic and rhetorical purposes.
14. Use resources and reference materials (e.g., dictionaries and thesauruses) to select effective and precise vocabulary that maintains consistent style, tone and voice.
15. Proofread writing, edit to improve conventions (e.g., grammar, spelling, punctuation and capitalization), identify and correct fragments and run-ons and eliminate inappropriate slang or informal language.
Writing Applications
2. Write responses to literature that:
a. advance a judgment that is interpretative, analytical, evaluative or reflective;
b. support key ideas and viewpoints with accurate and detailed references to the text or to other works and authors;
c. analyze the author’s use of stylistic devices and express an appreciation of the effects the devices create;
d. identify and assess the impact of possible ambiguities, nuances and complexities within text;
e. anticipate and answer a reader’s questions, counterclaims or divergent interpretations; and
f. provide a sense of closure to the writing.
Writing Conventions
1. Use correct spelling conventions.
2. Use correct capitalization and punctuation
3. Use correct grammar (e.g, verb tenses, parallel structure, indefinite
and relative pronouns).
Are you still with us? That was almost three pages of “standards” because an English teacher wanted to have students write an essay after reading a text. Can you imagine doing this for each activity you design as a teacher? What if your district requires you to have daily plans? Even weekly plans? With everything aligned to the state? How much time is spent playing a complex matching game, and there is not even a legal requirement to do it.
Do students perform better on high-stakes tests because their teachers spend time finding standards to enter onto lesson plan forms for keeping on file with a school district?